The Hampstead Mystery eBook

a message from a lady friend; suppose the lady went
to see him accompanied by a friend whom Sir Horace
did not like—­a friend of whom Sir Horace
was jealous. Suppose they asked for money—­blackmail—­and
there was a quarrel in which Sir Horace was shot.
Then we have your idea as to how the lady’s
handkerchief was torn—­I agree with that
in the main. The lady and her friend fled from
the place. Later in the night the place is burgled
by some one who has had his eye on it for some time,
and on entering the library he is astounded to find
the dead body of the owner. Suppose he went home,
and on thinking things over sent the letter to Scotland
Yard with the idea that if the police got on to his
tracks about the burglary the fact that he had told
us about the murder would show he had nothing to do
with killing Sir Horace.”

“That is a good theory, too,” said Rolfe,
in a meditative tone. “And the only person
who can tell us which is the right one is Sir Horace’s
lady friend. The problem is to find her.”

“Right,” said the inspector approvingly.
“And while you have been making inquiries at
the shops about the handkerchief I have been down to
the Law Courts branch of the Equity Bank where Sir
Horace kept his account. It occurred to me that
a look at Sir Horace’s account might help us.
You know the sort of man he was—­you know
his weakness for the ladies. But he was careful.
I looked through his private papers out at Riversbrook
expecting to get on the track of something that would
show some one had been trying to blackmail him over
an entanglement with a woman, but I found nothing.
I couldn’t even find any feminine correspondence.
If Sir Horace was in the habit of getting letters
from ladies he was also in the habit of destroying
them. No doubt he adopted that precaution when
his wife was alive, and found it such a wise one that
he kept it up when there was less need for it.
But a weakness for the ladies costs money, Rolfe,
as you know, and that is why I had a look at his banking
account. He made some payments that it would
be worth while to trace—­payments to West
End drapers and that sort of thing. Of course,
Sir Horace, being a cautious man and occupying a public
position, might not care to flaunt his weakness in
the eyes of West End shopkeepers, and instead of paying
the accounts of his lady friend of the moment, may
have given her the money and trusted to her paying
the bills—­a thing that women of that kind
are never in a hurry to do. In that case the payments
to West End shopkeepers are for goods supplied to
his daughter. However, I’ve taken a note
of the names, dates, and amounts of a number of them,
and I want you to see the managers of these shops.”